On Tuesday, June 11, 2019 at 1:06:37 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > On 9 Jun 2019, at 14:38, John Clark <[email protected] <javascript:>> > wrote: > > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 11:03 AM Bruno Marchal <[email protected] > <javascript:>> wrote: > > > *with Mechanism* [...] > > > Bruno, you use that word a lot, and I mean a LOT, but I'm still not sure > what you mean. I don't want you to give me your definition I want you to > give me examples of what you think it is and what you think it is not. > Let's start with these, no need for long explanations, a simple yes or no > will do and will give me an idea of what you're talking about: > > Is a cuckoo clock a mechanism? > > > I have never use the expression “a mechanism”. A cuckoo clock is an > informal not well defined notion, because it is unclear what you mean by > this (the physical object, or the simple counting algorithm that it > implements). > > I would need to define “a mechanism”, I would define it by anything Turing > emulable, with this defined in the purely mathematical way like Church, > Post, Turing, ... > > > > > Is a roulette wheel a mechanism? Is a Tritium atom with a half life of > 12.32 years a mechanism? Is the multiplication table a mechanism? > > > > If you define them in such a way that they are Turing emulable, then they > are “mechanism”, but I use the term “programs” or “digital machine” > instead. > > By “Mechanism” I have always mean “the mechanist hypothesis” which is the > conjunction of “Yes doctor” (= my consciousness is invariant for some > digital functional substitution) + the Church-Turing thesis. > > Mechanism, i.e. the mechanist hypothesis, should be sees as an hypothesis > in psychology or theology: the belief in a special sort of possible > technological reincarnation, or re-implementation. Then a reasoning shows > that the physical appearances must be retrieved from some digital-machine, > or sigma_1 arithmetical modes of machines self-reference, and that has been > confirmed up to now. > > Bruno > > >
It is sort of true in a way all of science is *Turing-emulable*: Everything we do science, every theory - from physics to biology - is simulated (implemented as programs) on conventional computers. There's numerical relativity, numerical cosmology, quantum Monte Carlo, computational chemistry and biology, on and on. Now new computers made of qubits (of exotic materials) or goo (of synbio) are being made, so whether these allow *non-Turing-emulable* "programs" to be realized is the question. @philipthrift -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/551af6cd-e698-4f80-a84e-b60d7dbc16d0%40googlegroups.com.
